With Watson, Is IBM Riding Right Wave?

IBM bets that its Watson technology will ride the cognitive-computing wave to commercial success -- while rivals gear up for the connected-computing era.

Two big names in technology held events in New York this week to declare the beginning of a third big wave in computing, but they were talking about different waves.

On Wednesday, Salesforce.com welcomed in the connected computing era, pointing to mobile, social, cloud, and billions of connected sensors and devices as things that will transform our personal lives, industries, and the ways organizations interact with individuals. Giving its own spin to the Internet of Things, Salesforce talked up the "Internet of Customers," seeing connected aircraft engines, cars, appliances, tablets, phones, wrist watches, and other devices as ultimately connected to somebody's customer.

On Thursday it was IBM's turn, and it asserted that the coming third wave will be the cognitive computing era. IBM's cognitive technology is Watson, which won its fame beating two grand champions at Jeopardy back in 2011. The key difference between cognitive computing and the programmable computing era that came before it is that it's not an "if-then" proposition, said IBM chairman, president and CEO Ginni Rometty.

"You had to program the computer to tell it what to do, and it is everything that you know [about computing] to this day," Rometty explained.

In the cognitive era that Rometty says IBM introduced with Watson, computers can learn, analyze, and reason in human-like ways. Watson understands natural language. It generates and evaluates hypotheses. It adapts to and learns new information. It's even learning to see, to hear, and to offer visual answers.

Cognitive computing would seem to be just what's needed in an era in which there is too much information. Healthcare organizations are hoping Watson can transform medicine by combing through mountains of medical research and patient-specific records to help doctors make accurate, personalized diagnoses and treatment decisions that take advantage of the latest available information. IBM partner Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York is training Watson as an Oncology Treatment Assistant. The Cleveland Clinic is using a system called WatsonPaths to support problem-based learning methods in its medical school. Executives from both institutions were on hand in New York to report on progress in their transformational deployments.

IBM CEO Ginni Rometty is doubling down on IBM's Watson bet with another $1 billion in investment.

Which Wave Is Bigger (Now)?To casual observers, Salesforce.com's version of the third-wave is more familiar, while cognitive computing might strike them more like a distant vision. All things mobile, social, and cloud have been the talk of the tech industry for years. Who isn't aware of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and dueling generations of Androids and iPhones? More recently, cloud computing, big data, and The Internet of Things have entered the popular lexicon. What big tech vendor hasn't forged a strategy on these fronts?

IBM, too, is all over the connected-computing trends, but it's all but alone in pursuing cognitive computing. That's one reason IBM announced late last year that it's building an ecosystem for Watson, inviting in commercial partners and entrepreneurial developers, and funding seed work on real-world applications.

Since the Jeopardy victory in 2011, IBM has been working furiously to commercialize Watson. As the Wall Street Journal reported this week, it has been slow going, with $100 million in revenue thus far against the company's goal of reaching $1 billion in revenue by 2018.

IBM announced on Thursday that it's doubling down on its bet on Watson. It is creating a dedicated IBM Watson Group business unit that will have its own office in New York's East Village. The unit will ramp up from a few hundred employees currently to more than 1,000. IBM also said it will pump another $1 billion into the development of the technology, with a focus on "a series of solutions that can deliver value in months, not years," said Mike Rhodin, the IBM senior VP who is moving over from IBM's Software Group to head the new business.

Looking beyond the transformative work in industries such as health care and financial services, IBM is working on developing repeatable enterprise solutions and a development ecosystem to dream up yet more real-world applications.

In meeting with a half dozen top health IT leaders last summer, I was surprised at the level of skepticism for Watson delivering value in medical diagnosis support. I don't expect Watson to make a diagnostic judgment, but does it seem far-fetched for such technology to have some role in suggesting probable diagnoses and treatments?

From business and revenue point of view, IBM is moving to a new area. I am not sure if this technology, though remarkable, can generate enough revenue to sustain growth of large company, like IBM. As IBM moving to a higher spectrum of technology for buisness growth, I am afraid they might neglect the base technology that supports the IBM's business revenue, growth and the customer satisfaction that comes with it.

And then John Conner and Arnold Schwarzenegger will beam back from the future and do battle to destroy the chip that IBM invents that thinks like a human and takes over the world... sorry, wrong story line.

Some day in the future.. 20 - 30 years?? both waves will merge into a super network of super smart, self learning, computers. They will learn from each other. New standards of information exchange will be developed. At some point, it will be on its own able to think and grow exponentially a million times faster than a human. The curve of AI will be a straight vertical line. Good? Bad? time will tell but it will happen.

IBM Watson operates on a higher plane. It is a cut above. It is a game changer. Each IBM Watson advancement represents the successful completion of a Grand Challenge including Blue Gene with its computational speed, Deep Blue with its demonstrated mastery of chess, Jeopardy with its lightening quick and accurate quiz game responses, cognitive computing and the promise of deep semantic discovery, cognitive systems now the inflection point of broad useful application, and the next challenge on the horizon which is to pass the U.S. Medical Examination.

The question here is whether IBM Watson could be a game changing advancement in Program Acquisition for so long an area of unmet need and Supply Chain Risk Management Assurance now the center of risk and uncertainty in national security and global competitiveness in a shrinking globalized world.

I know this because IBM is putting money into the success cognitive computing, and the IBM CEO is beeting her job on it.

If successful, the biggest news is that IBM is plowin this field by itself so as a minimum it will have a ten year leap over the competitiion.

IBM Watson operates on a higher plane. It is a cut above. It is a game changer. Each IBM Watson advancement represents the successful completion of a Grand Challenge including Blue Gene with its computational speed, Deep Blue with its demonstrated mastery of chess, Jeopardy with its lightening quick and accurate quiz game responses, cognitive computing and the promise of deep semantic discovery, cognitive systems now the inflection point of broad useful application, and the next challenge on the horizon which is to pass the U.S. Medical Examination.

The organizations to watch may not be tech companies but tech consumers such as the CIA, which continues to use vast computing power to identify relevant signals in an ever changing world of data noise. The fact that the CIA chose Amazon Web Services over IBM for a $600 million cloud infrastructure contract is telling: Even with IBM's leadership with Watson and cognitive computing, there are other factors at play in arriving at useful answers.

I'm also skeptical that by vacuuming up data from the Internet of Everything, that Salesforce will be able to deliver much more than just a lot of data about data.

Here's the link: I don't think we'll be able to wring full value out of the connected computing world without cognitive computing, machine learning, whatever you want to call it. The Internet of things creates just too many data points to consider all the possible connections to analyze. In that way it's a classic IBM play: yes, we all see this big idea out there, you'll need our stuff to actually do what you imagine.

Seems like every few years, some variation of AI is going to be The Next Big Thing, claiming that within a few years, we will have full on thinking computers that don't require any programming blah blah blah.

Call me a cynic, but I have heard this song too many times to buy into it.

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